Faith Hill shares her favorite holiday traditions and family stories.

Every creature was still stirring, much to Faith Hill's considerable chagrin.

"Each year, we try to read the Bible story and the poem ''Twas the Night Before Christmas,'" Hill recalls with a sigh. "But last year, we got a late start on everything, so we figured we could just skip the poem and hurry everyone along to bed. Well, our girls were just not having it. They started wailing, 'Nooo, we have to read it! We have to!' So we tried reading it real fast — 'TwasthenightbeforeChristmasdahdahdah' — and skipping a couple of parts, but our girls knew what was going on and they kept saying, 'No, you left out the part where he went to the window!' Tim and I were looking at each other thinking, How are we going to get these kids to go to sleep, already? We're so tired!"

Hill probably won't have a chance to rest up for Christmas this year. She's just released her seventh album, The Hits, featuring her most popular songs as well as three new tracks. And she hasn't finished unpacking from the joint world tour she and her superstar husband, country singer Tim McGraw, completed last summer with their three daughters — Gracie, 10, Maggie, 9, and Audrey, 6 — in tow. The family got home to Nashville just a few weeks before school started. "I still have stacks of clothes and boxes in my dining room," says Hill, who is 40.

Soon, though, everything will be stowed to make way for Hill and McGraw's monthlong holiday festivities. Raised with two older brothers in tiny Star, MS, Hill is the kind of woman who places a lot of importance on family rituals. She and McGraw, from the small town of Start, LA, have been married for 11 years. Though they have busy performing schedules (and 16 platinum albums, eight Grammys, and 13 Country Music Awards between them), the girl from Star and the boy from Start clear their calendars every December and get down to the very important job of celebrating the season. They have a particularly good reason for getting in the spirit early.

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"Our youngest daughter, Audrey, was born on December 6," Hill says, settling on a couch at a studio near her home in Nashville. "She was eight weeks premature, and we were finally able to bring her home the day before Christmas Eve. So this time of year just feels extra-special to us. And now, every year, to celebrate Audrey's birthday, we decorate the tree on the sixth. It's a little bit of a challenge, keeping a live tree fresh for the entire month of December. But there's no other way we'd do it: We decorate on the sixth, and it has to be a live tree."

In fact, Hill says, the family has developed a number of Christmas rituals that absolutely, positively must be followed. "One year, I decorated a little differently, and the girls were crazed. They said: 'What do you mean you're not going to put the Christmas carolers on the piano? They have to be there, they're there every year!'" Hill shrugs as she pulls back her butter-blond hair. "You know, I was the same way when I was little: Mom, you have to put the ball on that side of the tree because we always put it on that side! So, we're pretty steeped in tradition at our house."

One of those traditions is the annual gift for Santa's hardworking sleigh pullers. "We make food for the reindeer," Hill says. "It's oatmeal, birdseed...and silver glitter. When you have girls, you have glitter. We mix it up and then we throw it all over the lawn, so that when Santa lands, the reindeer will have something to eat. And wouldn't you know it, every year, amazingly, one of the reindeer drops a little silver sleigh bell onto the lawn. So the girls have a nice collection."

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Click on the next page to continue reading about Faith Hill's holiday traditions.

Andrew Eccles

They also have quite an assortment of seasonal sleepwear. "We open one present on Christmas Eve," Hill says, pulling her gray cardigan around her and hugging her knees to her chest. "And it's always matching pajamas for the girls. I want them to have the same ones, so I can take a really great picture of them, you know? But that's a stupid idea, clearly, because they all have different tastes. Last year, Gracie opened hers up and said, 'I don't like flannel, Mom. Don't ever buy me flannel pj's again.' Meanwhile, Tim makes this special spaghetti sauce every Christmas Eve, and it was taking forever and wasn't ready on time. And so we ended up rushing through the poem. And then, the next morning, no one wanted to eat the breakfast casserole I'd made — they all just wanted to race to the living room to open presents."

Hill says that when she thinks back to her own childhood Christmases, she often marvels at how her mother orchestrated the celebrations. "The hardest thing for me is planning ahead," she says, addressing her holiday snafus. "My mom was brilliant at it. For Christmas Day, she would have already made all of her desserts, and the sweet-potato casserole, and the stuffing — from scratch — days or even weeks in advance, so she could either freeze them or have them ready in the refrigerator.

"But not me," Hill says. "I'm doing it Christmas morning, after we've opened presents with the children, and it's exhausting. By about two o'clock in the afternoon, I'm ready to just lay on the couch for the rest of the day. This year, I'll try to plan it out better. Because not doing it is not an option. I think I'm a lot like other moms out there who feel like if we don't have the pecan pie we have every year, then it just won't be Christmas."

Whatever the subject, Hill's conversation soon turns to "our girls." Gracie, the eldest, is now at the stage where she's beginning to assert her personality — "I think that when she gets a little bit older, we'll become even closer," Hill says — and Maggie is a nature-obsessed animal lover who turned vegetarian for more than a year because she was so horrified by a storefront window full of fur coats. Audrey, the youngest, is smart, funny, "and very thoughtful," says her mom. "And lately, she's really been into opera." The girls' differences became clear when the family moved into a new home last year and Hill asked each daughter how she'd like her room to be decorated.

"Maggie said she wanted her room to look like 'the colors of the sunset in Africa.' Where she's never been. So I thought, Oh, that'll be easy," Hill says, rolling her eyes. "Audrey wanted hers to look like an opera house. And Gracie said, 'I don't care what it looks like as long as it's not classy.'" Hill leans back and lets out a whoop of laughter. "I mean, what? She said: 'I don't like your taste in furniture. So anything you'd pick out, I don't want in my room.' I think what she meant was that she didn't want anything traditional or old-fashioned; she wanted sleek and modern," Hill says. "But still: 'I don't want anything classy.' I thought, Well, I hope that doesn't apply to her taste in clothes once she's a teenager."

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On a roll now, Hill leans forward to share another anecdote. "I don't know if I should even tell you this," she begins, then breaks into giggles. "It's just so funny. You know, we've done what all the books tell you you're supposed to do, and taught the girls all the proper names for their, um, anatomy. Now, in my day, that is not what was done; we definitely had cute little names for things. But the girls know what a vagina is." Hill's face flushes a bit as she says the word. "We have this rope swing in our back­yard. And the other day, some lifelong family friends were over, and Audrey was on the swing. One of our friends was pushing her, and she was swinging pretty high. So he said to her, 'Are you OK, Audrey?' And she said 'Yeah, I'm fine...it's just that sometimes this swing gives me a vagina wedgie.' The poor guy pushing her didn't know what to say!"

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Hill dissolves into laughter, shaking her head at the memory. It's clear that nothing gives her as much pleasure as her girls and her husband, especially during the holidays. "The first year we were married and that we had Gracie, Tim wrote me a letter that he put in my stocking," she recalls. "And he wrote one to Gracie, too. Now he does it every year. I get a letter from him in my stocking, and so do each of the girls. I can't even tell you how much that means to me."

Hill and her husband don't give their daughters extravagant presents; they're adamant that the McGraw sisters will not be spoiled. "I grew up asking for everything under the sun for Christmas, but I knew I wasn't going to get it all," Hill says. "And we make sure that our girls realize that, too. We don't get them lavish gifts: Last year, glitter markers were a big hit."

And the fancy paper may be even more alluring than the present itself. "The girls do give each other gifts. But right now, it's mostly about the wrapping, and eventual unwrapping, for them," Hill says, laughing. "They just bring down stuff from their rooms that they don't want anymore, and say, 'I really want to wrap this for Sissy,' which is what they call each other. I say, 'But you just wrapped four other things for her!' But they say, 'Yeah, I know, but I really want her to have this, too.' And they give me and Tim gifts that they made in school. I just love that so much. I've saved every one of them."

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Ultimately, of course, Christmas isn't about the stuff. Each year, Hill, McGraw, and the girls create new traditions — recently, they discovered the holiday movie The Family Stone and added it to their roster of must-see Christmas films — and Hill looks forward to watching her daughters pass these rituals on to their own families someday.

"We're raising our girls to understand the real meaning of Christmas, and to know that it's most important to have Christmas in your heart. We go to our local mall and donate toys, and we say prayers for all the people in the world who might not be as lucky as we are. And as they grow older, I just want the girls to know that Christmas is a special time, no matter what. Even if the pie turns out bad, or you spill the reindeer food on the floor, or the corn bread stuffing doesn't seem right.

"Even," she says with a grin, "if the pajamas are flannel."

Go to the next page to see a few of Faith's favorite things.

Christmas carol: "I love 'Little Drummer Boy.' I'm working on a Christmas album right now, and that's going to be on there."

Guilty pleasure: "Lay's Barbecue Potato Chips. And I'm not talking about the little bag — I like the great big bag, with some homemade ranch dip. And a real Coke. If I start eating that, there's no way for me to stop."

Place in the world: "Home. And to me, home is Nashville. Especially at Christmas, Tim and I will get in the car with our kids and just drive around and look at the lights."

Childhood gift: "A little wooden airplane that I could ride on, sort of like a rocking horse, but it had rubber wheels so I could scoot around the house in it."

Holiday food: "I bake cookies with the girls every year, which is great. But when I was a girl, my parents grew their own vegetables in their garden, so I love vegetables, too. Of course, being a Southern cook, I make them in a way that removes whatever vitamins they might have. But there's nothing better than a good green-bean casserole."

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